Jim Parsons, who rose to fame on The Big Bang Theory and is currently appearing on Broadway in Titanique, is opening up about his mental health during the height of his sitcom fame and success.
Appearing on the YouTube podcast All Out with Jon Dean (watch it below), Parsons spoke with the British host – both openly gay – about the pressures of fame, growing up gay and coming to terms with his personal life while giving greater attention to his professional success and public persona.
“I look back now and realize that there were many ways, at some of the best moments of my life, I was miserable,” Parsons tells Dean. “I was not happy. I was stressed.”
Parsons describes himself, in so many words, as a workaholic during the Big Bang days, and that he would never want to return to that way of living.
“I felt that there was so many plates I was supposed to be keeping in the air and that the success and the good things of life that were happening were only due to this overworking, discipline and whatever,” he says. “Maybe to a degree that was true. I don’t know. I can’t say because that’s how I was.”
Asked by Dean about his approach to life at his current 53 years of age, Parsons says he would go back to his Big Bang lifestyle for “any amount of money.”
“It translated in part into a work ethic,” he says, “but it was really just obsessive behavior basically. Yes, I was disciplined. Yes, I had a good work ethic, but a lot of it was because it was kind of OCD in nature…I had a list of things basically in my head that I had to get done in order to be comfortable and know that I could do my job right, which I don’t think was true.”
Parsons concedes that the public perception of him as Big Bang‘s Sheldon “is not going away” seven years after the show went off the air. His relationship with the character, he adds, is “evolving.”
“It gets better all the time,” he says. “What I feel is better, what I feel is healthier.”
“I wouldn’t be where I am right now if I hadn’t have had that time of life, and the somewhat self-tortured nature of it was part of it.”
